Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. 523 pages.

James Gibson is a left-of-center scholar who noticed a curious lack of interest in addressing the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam during the years following the war. Pundits were quick to use Vietnam as a point of departure for discussions of other topics, but they carefully avoided discussing the war itself. Liberals felt that Vietnam was a mistake, conservatives felt that we lost due to self-imposed restraints, and no one examined the evidence.

Gibson's loose thesis is that the U.S. fought the war as an affair of statistics and technology, and made the mistake of assuming that the enemy was fighting the same war. The assumption was that the enemy would have to acknowledge our superior firepower and our higher body counts, and then they would surrender. For Washington, the war was a logistical exercise in production: when certain quotas were met, then certain boundaries were redrawn to reflect newly-secured areas on the map. But when reports from the field were skewed to reflect these priorities, it only served to increase our bureaucratic isolation. Ultimately the managers in Washington were far removed from the realities in Vietnam, and had become the dupes of their own definitions.
ISBN 0-87113-063-7

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